Where the hell is Romeo?

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The Old Van Theatre Company has truly ockerised
Romeo and Juliet, writes Carolyn Webb.

Director Fiona Blair displays little reverence in her update of
Romeo and Juliet. She's set Shakespeare's classic tragedy
in a dusty northern Victorian town in the late 1960s. The two
feuding families, the Montagues and Capulets, are fruit growers.
Young men hoon around town in hotted-up cars. And they fight one
another with picking knives instead of swords.

This is the third production the acclaimed Old Van Theatre
Company has staged for the Mildura/Wentworth Arts Festival. Blair
formed the company in 1998 with three actor friends. Its signature
has been transplanting classic plays into regional Victoria.

Old Van's 2003 piece, A Midsummer Night's Dreaming, was
staged in a golf course swamp that used to be the Mildura pool. Its
time setting was Mildura's 1956 flood, and a theme was Aboriginal
stolen children.

In 2004's festival, Blair tackled Cervantes' Don
Quixote, renaming it Don Coyote: Man of the Mallee.
Set in the 1970s and staged outdoors at the Australian Inland
Botanic Gardens, near Mildura, it followed the adventures of a man
obsessed with movies who escapes from an old people's home.

Romeo and Juliet will be staged in and outdoors at the
vacant Aurora fruit packing plant at Merbein, west of Mildura from
March 17 to 19. "I like to take really iconic European texts and
then go, 'No, it's set here, it's about here'. I think we're scared
of European texts. But they're ours; they're our heritage, too. We
have a right to own them," she says.

Blair has modernised the Romeo and Juliet text,
changing "thee" and "thou" to "you" and "your", and in a bawdy
passage in which Juliet's nurse remembers weaning Juliet as a baby,
she speaks of her "tit" rather than the Shakespearean "dug", and
says it was done by the "chook-shed wall" rather than the
"dovehouse wall".

"People are real purists, whereas I don't think Shakespeare was.
I think he was a bums-on-seats man."

The cast includes professionals and amateurs.

Other festival highlights - Blair is also the festival's
artistic director - include a concert by James Morrison and Deborah
Conway; writer and performer Andreas Litras' one-man show,
Odyssey, a humorous retelling of his family's migration
from Greece, based on Homer's classic tale; and an extensive film
festival.